Work

Engram Wiki

AI
Knowledge Management
Open Source

An open-source pattern for giving an AI assistant durable, persistent memory about your work — a git repository of markdown files an LLM can read to answer as someone who already knows your context.

A network of connected nodes representing a knowledge graph

Most LLM interactions are stateless. You explain your context, get a response, and start from scratch next time. Engram Wiki fixes that by storing your professional knowledge — projects, people, decisions, meeting history, writing style, and communication preferences — as markdown files in a git repository. When those files are available to an AI assistant, the model doesn’t just answer questions; it answers them as someone who already knows your context.

Git tracks changes to code. This pattern tracks changes to a person’s knowledge-work in a machine-readable format — every commit a snapshot of what you knew, decided, and were paying attention to.

Why “engram”?

An engram is the physical trace of a memory in the brain — the enduring network of neurons that changes when you experience something, letting you store and recall it later. The repo is the same idea for your work: a durable, machine-readable memory trace an AI can store and recall.

What it provides

The repository ships intentionally empty — structure, templates, and AI behavioral instructions only, no real content. It establishes a baseline directory model that adapts to any knowledge-work role:

  • daily/ — append-only log of raw signal and observations
  • people/, projects/, topics/ — living documents on collaborators, initiatives, and durable concepts
  • decisions/ — ADR-style logs, immutable once written
  • preferences/ and style/ — standing instructions for tone, defaults, and house style
  • templates/, indexes/, exports/ — scaffolding for consistent, cross-referenced entries

The AI’s canonical instructions live in CLAUDE.md (read automatically by Claude Code), with a pointer for Copilot-based assistants.

Acknowledgements

The pattern is an independent reconstruction of ideas from Andrej Karpathy on LLMs as operating systems with persistent context, and Nate B Jones on structured personal knowledge management with AI copilots.

The project is open source under the MIT license. View the repository on GitHub.